Review: ‘Mercy Street,’ a Civil War Hospital Drama on PBS

A stately building owned by a wealthy family whose fortunes are in jeopardy. A principled American beauty who married a European nobleman. Lavish helpings of period dresses, ball gowns and uniforms. “Mercy Street” may be the rare PBS drama that’s set in the United States, but don’t worry: “Downton Abbey” fans will find that it has some comfortingly familiar elements.

This six-episode Civil War series, which will follow “Downton” on Sunday nights, beginning this weekend, also shares that British hit’s style: genteel melodrama, talky, sentimental and lightly comic, with the occasional action sequence (an escape, a bomb plot) to spice things up.

“Mercy Street” suffers in the comparison, however. Its writers aren’t working at the same level when it comes to turning a phrase or developing a more than one-dimensional character. And the tone, a kind of perky gravity that sits well on the early-20th-century British gentry, is a more awkward fit in a story set in the midst of a war over slavery.

The building where much of the action takes place is a hotel in Alexandria, Va., that has been commandeered by the Union Army as a hospital, and the central character is Mary Phinney (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), an abolitionist (and widow of a baron) who volunteers as a nurse. She’s soon in charge of the nursing staff, having the usual sorts of battles with the egotistic Army doctors.

Alexandria is presented, apparently with some basis in fact, as a Casablanca-like free zone, a Southern city occupied by the North, where Union and Confederate, slave and free, can uneasily mingle. Mary’s counterpart in the plot is Emma Green (Hannah James), a member of the family that owns the hotel, who comes to the hospital looking for a friend and ends up volunteering as a nurse because she’s upset by the inferior treatment given the Confederate patients.

“Mercy Street” (the title isn’t explained until the fifth episode) tries to generate much of its dramatic force from the question of loyalty. Each character can be graded by his or her shifting ability to sympathize with those on both sides of the conflict, and the biggest moral flaw is blind devotion to either cause.

But at heart, “Mercy Street,” which counts Ridley Scott and the “E.R.” writer David Zabel among its executive producers, is a medical soap opera — “Grey’s Anatomy” with crinolines — and that’s the show’s most entertaining aspect. It actually echoes a much better period hospital drama, Steven Soderbergh’s Cinemax series, “The Knick.” The central doctor, Jedediah Foster, is aware of European innovations and a little too fond of morphine: a dead ringer for Dr. John Thackery of “The Knick.”

Foster, the show’s most engaging character, is played by Josh Radnor, previously known as a bumbling good guy on the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.” Here, Mr. Radnor is not as lightweight as you might fear, but not as resonant as you might hope. More distinctive performances are given by Gary Cole as the hotel’s pragmatic owner, and by Norbert Leo Butz as a preening, theatrical surgeon.

In another overlap with “The Knick,” Foster encourages a black laborer (McKinley Belcher III) who has an aptitude for medicine. It’s notable that while the black characters’ story lines are secondary to those of the white nurses and doctors — in the PBS cast list, the first six actors are white — their scenes tend to be those that generate real emotion. When a laundress (Shalita Grant) explains freedom to a young slave, or a freed servant (L. Scott Caldwell of “Lost”) demands wages for the first time, “Mercy Street” temporarily breaks its soap opera bonds.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: When a Virginia Suburb Was Like Casablanca. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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